him. i said, tim, i love you but i ain't praying for him. he said been used to do with me while i do. and he sat there and he prayed for a critic my name. donna hearne people that do that. >> watch "after words" tonight at nine eastern on c-span2's booktv. ..

that seemed to have little interest in uniting or compromising or even trying to get along. one of the founding notions of america, of course, was as a democratic system, in which differences of race, ethnicity, religion, and so on, would be taken up in a shared identity, but these days messages that appeal to shared values seem repeatedly trumped by messages

intended to exploit narrow group identities. amy argues in our international affairs and domestic dealings, americans have fallen prey to tribalism, abroad we have all too often been blind to it, and at home, we have a debill -- debilitating tendency so revert to. i. review okayed it compact, insightle, disquieting and ultimately hopeful, because for all her critique, amy, who herself is the daughter of immigrants, sees signs of people trying to cross divides and break out of their political tribes. where all these efforts amount to a definite seismic trend is debatable but at least they're encouraging and psychological research shows that humans can in various ways break the tribal

spiral. amy will be in conversation with j. d. vance, author of holiday hillbilly elegy." but a growing up in appalachian habits. amy and j. d. know each other well. when j. d. was a student at yale law school, amy took an interest in him and his background and helped persuade him his life and his conclusions were worth putting down on paper. she even introduced j. d. to the person who became his literary agent. we should all have such help with our literary undertakings. but amy has said that it mentors j. d. has been a two-way street for her. she has learned a great deal from him about a world that she had known little about. so, ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming amy chua

and j. d. vance. [applause] >> hi, j. d. >> hi. this is my first ever interview or, as -- my first ever interview as the interviewer rather than the interviewee. i will probably be terrible at it but i felt i would start by just talking a little bit more personally about how we know each other, and it occurs to me like you said earlier, my book is really at least partially because of you, becauseow introduce node tina bennet, my literary agent and who gave me

confidence the book wag worth publishing. he the only thing i have done to repay you for it to is to come here and have a nice conversation. so it's been a one-sided relationship. let's talk about where that relationship came from for those in the audience who aren't familiar with it. what -- i'm cure you never asked you this question, when is was a student at yale law school, what did you think about me and why didow you encourage me to write this book. >> i met j. d., his very first day of law school. he was one of maybe 70 students in my contracts class. i remember he sat in the very, very back row. he was a tall guy, stood out. and in the front row over here was a woman named -- now j. d.'s

wife. and i think j. d. and i clicked from the very beginning. it's interesting. i've said this on the record. superficially it would seem we have nothing in common. i'm the daughter of chinese immigrants, both parents have graduate degrees, but i always felt like an outsider growing up, which is why i'm so interesting in tribalism and identity and culture. i've never fit in anywhere in some ways. not in this country, when guy to china i certainly don't fit there. not in california, not in the midwest where i started. and not now on the keyes. so, j. d. and i won'ted. we had so much -- bonded. we had so much weird stuff in common am little bit of not liking pretend -- pre tensesiveness. eating all you can at the buffet. we had just had a lot of views in common. i was -- in january 2011,

january 8, 2011, my life completely changed. before then i was a mild mannered professor, writing about foreign policy and ethnic conflict, and i wrote this book, battle him of the tiger money and "the wall street journal" exert excerpted it with the incendiary title why chinese mothers are superior. and it went just completely viral, interestingly enough in parallel way, how j. d.'s book went viral but in a positive sense. but in my case it was very bad. i had no social media no facebook, i didn't twitter, not equipped for this. i was getting hundreds of hate e-mails per second. child abuser, just terrible, terrible. and i was on -- i still remember being in a hotel room by myself, just so upset, lonely, i was in

seattle, and i get an e-mail from j. d. and d two. he was studying for his contracts exam. so the first e-mail asked me some boring question, if contractor a builds a house -- three hours later, now 1:00 in the morning issue get a second e-mail from j. d. and i can tell he has had a beer or two. >> more than that. >> and what is amazing about j. d., he has the least money of anybody at yale law school. it's a privileged place. part of a problem we'll get to. j. d. is the one guy we no money, somehow goes and buys the book and this is another thing that we have in common, a lot of people talk about books without having read them. j. d. read the thing. read the thing and then wrote me this long e-mail, and this, believe it or not, even in my own trauma, i read this, this e-mail where he said i can't believe you got in trouble for this, at least you were trying.

he told me a little bit about his own family, which he had previously not told me. he was sort of more suggestive your mother was nurse you never said she was. but i saw this e-mail and i said, you need to write this story. you just need to write this story. and what is funny is i threw a book party for j. d. last year. i went and dug up my old e-mail because he -- maybe a week dish don't foe -- maybe few days later -- no. nat same evening, he sent me something, ten pages of just his own thoughts and i found them and they are the exact same opening of hillbilly ill elegy. it's an e-mail january 13, 201, 1 almost unchanged pages of the book. so that's the whole story. >> well, i remember that in law

school i always felt lost. not just me and other kids and other students as well. i always felt i could rely on amy for cultural advice i. don't know what to job to apply to or class to take. i would go to you, how shy behave in a social circumstance and you were always very comfortable offering that advice. i don't know if you remember this but there was this moment i think it was toward the end of the first year of law school and i thought i had burned this bridge with you, and the reason i thought that i had burned the bridge is we went out as a class, maybe in smaller groups but reasonably large groups, 10 or 12 of us and we were out for drinks, and i remember the dozen or so of us were talking about law school and talking about life, and you like to get to know your students and we deed this things and at the table next to us, an incredibly belligerent drunk guy and i

remember i kept thinking so myself, act you have been there don't say the thing you want to say, and it kept on going on and kept on suggesting ridiculous things about in the table and was criticizing me and my class mates. finally i stood up and i think the exact quote was, can i fing help you? and i said it in a really loud voice and made it clear i expected and indeed invited a confrontation with the person, and i immediately felt to myself, iing this is a terrible mistake. i lost my temper, and this person who has been incredibly kind to me my entire experience will never speak to me again this be person who stood behind me was -- >> my husband. yeah. we have a lot of -- yeah. a lot of stories. >> so that was a fun experience.

so, enough about that. let's talk about this incredible book, and it's really excellent. will read just a bit from what i wrote in the blurb. amy article "arrrgh" that's tribalism and the social dysfunction and violence is a norm all over the world it the united states managed managed te thanked to shared international identity but theirs trouble. let's talk about that trouble. maybe we can just start for those -- i imagine most have not read the book, given it's only been out a few days. maybe you can walk us through the basic thesis of political tribes. if haven't read it, buy it. >> so, starting opinion is that human beings are tribal. really tribal. biologically so. so some of my favorite part of the book are actually not quite about in the politics but some fascinating studies. just tell you about one.

recently researchers gave -- took kid between ages of four and eight, and randomly assign end them to the red team or the blue team. and gave them t-shirts with the corporationing colors. they -- corresponding colors. they then sat children in front. the computer docks and showed them computer edits images of children, half wearing blue and have wearing red. they then -- the researchers then asked the children the subjects for their reactions to these kids. the results were astonishing. even though these children had -- knew nothing about the children in the pictures, they consistently, and passionately, said they liked the children better who are wearing their color, they wanted to allocate more resources to them, and they thought they were better in every way. smarter, more moral, nicer people. almost more troubling, these

kids displayed a unconscious bias, when told stories about these kids, and then asked -- they asked the children about them afterwarddedle the children systematically remembered all the good things about the people wearing the color of their team and anythingtive things about people on the other side. and tons more studies show that we desperately want to belong to these groups and once we connect to a group, it's almost like facts don't matter. we just want to see everything through the lens of that tribe, and if you are presented with evidence that your tribe is doing something wrong, something bad, your response is often just to stick to your tribe, and you're feeling and doing that is not that you're being stupid or irresponsible, it's that you're being loyal. so, that is the starting point. so, the -- when i originally started writing the book it was going to be only a foreign policy book, and i'll explain

how it bake the book it is. so three years ago i was writing about how the united states -- we go out in our foreign policy and tend to think of the conflicts in terms of grand ideological battles. capitalism versus commune jim, and then the next with a was authoritarianism versus democracy. we did democracy. after 9/11 it was axis of evil burrs freedom. always these grand principles and we always think that democracy is going to be the panacea. so the result is when we go into a country like iraq or syria or afghanistan we don't pay any attention to the group identities that matter most to people on theground. -- on the ground. the felons the book but basically part is because of our

own extraordinary success with the simulation. the idea is, in the country germans and hungarians and polls and irish and italian and japanese could become americans within a generation or two, then why can't sunnies and shiased kurds -- we just lead to have an elegs. the problem is you understand tribalism and understand the demographics, democracy often tantalizes group conflict. i give an interesting example of vietnam. most people know that the united states saw vietnam too much through a cold war lens and underestimated the extent to which the vietnamese people were fighting for their independence and sovereignty as opposed to cold war marxism.

but here's something that i bet most of you don't know. and most experts don't know and that is there was a different ethnic problem we completely missed and that completely undermined all of our effort inside vietnam and that is we couldn't tell -- we didn't care about the difference between the vietnamese and the chinese. i was -- it's funny as an anecdote i was gelling on tv and something in d.c. said don't use the example bass americans don't know the difference between chinese and vietnamese so we always -- our foreign policy, we assume that vietnam was a pawn of communist china. if anybody -- you could see mcnajera talking about if you just paid a little bit of attention though history of vietnam you would see that is

impossible. china is this gargantuan country, like bin general genie on a little lamp and the lamp being vietnam. china has been the none one enemy of vietnam. everying my, every hero, has always been fighting china. china invaded vietnam ask and colonized it for a thousand years. the idea that vietnam would be a pawn of china is foolish. but more importantly, and then i'll stop with this, inside vietnam, there was also this ethnic dimension and that is that vietnam had what i call a market dominant minority. that is, tiny, one percent, outsider chinese minority. they weren't vietnamese. who controlled 70% of the country's wealth. this is true of all the southeast asian contracts.

chinese cap yields went vietnamese and the u.s. missed this. we were going support capitalism and failed to see from the pounded of view of the vietnamese people we were asking them to fight and die basically to keep this resented, hated minority wealthy. so, that is -- the book was originally going to be about how our blindness to these incredibly important tribal and group identities are responsible for some of hour greatest foreign policy disasters, and how did i get to the domestic part? last february, i'll never forget it dish was teaching a class that i have taught for 20 years, j. d. was in it. a popular class, called international business transactions, but it's where i talk about by moan ideas about democracy and ethnic conflict and, this was one month after president trump had taken office. i was talking to this large class, and i was doing the whole thing that i've said for 20

bears. >> because of developing country dynamics are so different from our own, we keep messing up or foreign policy. so, in developing countries, for example, you often get demagoguery politicians with no political experience who sweep to power on anti-establishment platforms, scapegoats minorities and targeting other people, and sweeping to power on an ethnically tinged wave of populism and i was talking about hugo chavez in venezuela, which i have written but and i stopped and were there 80 eyes looking at me, thinking the same thing and one student said it. it sound like you're describing america. and that was last february, and so the book took on a life of its own. had to rethink a lot of things, but basically a big point of the book is that united states

today, for reasons ick get into, for the first anytime our history we are starting to display dynamics much more typical of developing countries. things we thought, that will never happen to us. populist movement lurches towards authoritarianism. we are starting to see these exact same patterns and they're very predictable. right here in our own country, and the book is an explanation, it's not random. i think lot of people are puzzled, how did we get here? once you start look through the lens of democracy and tribalism, and you look at the parallels to other countries, it's actually very predictable and it's also why i'm -- well, i'll get to that. if you understand the problem you can better overcome it. >> let's talk about the domestic side of this. i think in a lot of ways it ising and the most relevant in a news worthy type of way to a lot

of discussions we're having today in the country. just scale back a little bit and talk about the why. why is the united states or at least most people -- why are most people in the united states relatively blind to this happening? you can see it happening in vietnam and it's a big part of the reason we didn't underunderstand the underlike dynamics in vietnam some people who argued that the buyer adventure in iraq would end in disaster because we weren't giving proper credence and understanding to egg anything conflicts, the sunni-shia thing and the kurdistan and arab thing, and iraq, and when i deployed to iraq, i remember that a lot of folk is served with were reading this book called the case for democracy, very influential in the bushes as a, and the argument was if

you bring democracy, they vote for in their best interests and the ethnic conflicts fades away and the good, decent, wise, popular will starts to take over. but that obviously wasn't a convincing argument then and i think the reason i'm so curious and why you think that americans are relatively blind to this is because if you're right and i think there are certainly ways in which your argue. is compelling -- this has become an american phenomenon in a way it hasn't been in recent history. why are we so blind to the fact that all over the world,ing nick identity, racial identity, religious identity, matters more than national identity as the united states and its people often conceive of it. why does it matter more we often give credit to? >> so, three simple reasons we tend to be very blind. the first is that democracy

really has worked very smoothly in this country for a very pick reason. america for most of its 200 year history was dominated overwhelmingly, economically, politically, and militarily, and culturally, by a white majority. obviously with white being a moving target, not all groups were considered white but basically we -- whites dominated the country. so that -- what happens is democracy is very stable from a political point of view. there are plenty of tribes and voices and smaller groups but they're all oppressed. so, free market democracy in a situation where you have one group that is overwhelmingly dominant, economically, and politically, is a very stable. so, we belt feltlike there's dash lot of people thought why is there so much tribalism now? always been tribalism, all

business the groups. just their voices were suppressed before, and they didn't have voice. point two is what i already said. we have had a very successful history of assimilation, so our blindness is also rooted in some of our deepest, best values, the enlightenment. it was always about overcoming these sectarian and religious and terrible ethnic things the these principles, democracy, individualism, rule of law, these things will triumph, and america, the experiment, was the great enlightenment experiment. markets that are neutral. democracy that is neutral. and what i point out in the book is that democracy is not ethnically neutral, and markets are not ethnically neutral. the principles may be but they disproportionately benefit different groups. the final answer, j., is -- i hate this term bus it's overused and part of the problem but

another reason we have been blind to these differences is racism. in vietnam, i got very kind endorsements from both general mcchrystal and david petraeus. do not note them and they agreed with me that the united states did not pay enough attention to the tribal identities to, to these smaller sectarian identitieses, and in vietnam, for example, it was just the asia -- the vietnamese, chinese, chines, their all gooks. what's the different. and in iraq i general mcmaster did some things very successful. he was the first person to really pay attention to these tribal and sectarian identities and the turned it around for the time he was there. one thing he specific by said was if you use a derogatory

term, racist term to reefer to all arabs or all muslims, you are basically handing the enemy a victory. so, i think that's another reason. they all look the same, we have some negative view of all these brown people or chinese people, asian people. >> to take this to the domestic policy realm and then political realm, so, i remember being in new york city the night of election and was in a party of republican party leaders leadero expects the election to not go well it and was a weird vibe where around 9:00 we're sitting around drinking and hoping that by 11:00 or 12:00 we have had enough and we're not going to be so sad about the news we hear the following morning and there were many trump skeptical republicans but not a room that expected the leaks to go against trump but i expected against the entire party, i i remember

getting call from abc and they were doing the election coverage and said way need you to come in. i said why? they said we need somebody to talk about the white working class because this election is not going the way that we expected it to go. i said 0, interesting, sure. i'll come. in i caught a cab and wednesday to abc studios and i remember arriving there, and there were a couple of thing is heard in the aftermath and also an experience i had that night, at the election headquarters of abc that continued to stick with me. the first is that you heard a lot of commentators saying in he wake of the 2016 election, the white house work -- the white workings class for the first time voted like an ethnic group, always been pols pols and italis and irish and so on. but for the first time you could say that the white working class, meaning white americans without a college degree, seemed to be voting in the way the traditional ethic groups voted

in the united states and that's something i heard a fair amount and bears a little bit on your thesis. but the flipside is that the folks who were working at abc -- weren't just immediate use folks or journalists or television producers, tv personalities and so forth. they acted almost like somebody that they really loved had just been killed. and there was this sense of deep abiding grief at the studio that night, and it occurred to me that if the white working class was voting like an ethnic group, then this was -- the group of people i was spending time with on election night at the abc studios, they were kind of akin to an ethnic group because they were grieving together, reacting not just as they had lost an election but something really deep and culturally affronting had just happened. and that was -- that experience is really what makes me so interested in the thesis of your book. do sometimes wonder that we're

behaving, our political ideologies in the united states or political groupings are a big behavioring more like its ethnicities. >> i was not surprised by the election. i can explain some of that later. it's more what i kept hearing, being whispered underground. so, here's why i think we are where we are. first, the massive demographic changes that we all know about. the browning of america. immigration in the last 30 years has really the flows have been much bigger and the composition now principle by before it was from europe and now mostly from latin america, asia and africa so whites are for the first time on the verge of losing their majority status. the predictions are by 2044.

so, back to what i said. for most of americans, whites were comfort whether i -- comfortably dominant and you can do terrible things, slavery, oppress, and you can also be more generous enlightened. what happens now is every single group in america feels threatened. not just blacks and other minorities who feel threatened. whites feel threatened. a study in my book says 67% of the white working class feel that they are more victim nailed against than -- industrial discriminated against than myometer. not just muslims and jews and buddhists who feel threatened. christians feel threatened. with the #metoo movement, it's not yourself men or women or gray or straights and every group feels threatened and

thinks the other tribes' claims to be persecute and discriminated against are ridiculous. so, that is part of it, tis demographic change. the second reason who are where we are has to do with why you're the expert on this, j. d., and i think when you read a lot of stuff in the papers, it's wrong. there's all this flinging around, white supremacy, white nationalism. i its not helpful to call half of the country white supremacists. it's not actually what it happening, what is happening is what i call in my book, we almost have two white tribes now. that is, class and it's not just money, but it's really educational levels and almost like a cultural divide has split america's white majority. and it's interesting that j. d. used this term, ethnic, because long with was the tiger mother, his field was ethnicity, and

ethnic conflict. i have a 17-page footnote describing what ethnicity is and it's very difficult and constructive abuse and -- but the one feature of an ethnic divide is if you don't intermarry with each other. your egg in -- not a perfect definition but groups often don't seem to have ethnic differences because you are intermarry and this is something new in america because of this drastic decline in geographical mobility in this country. something else j. d. is working on. used to be that people from the midwest would dough education or whatever, you do go to silicon valley or -- not -- trek out to california or any of the coasts and rise and come back. now it's so expensive to live in

the coasts. silicon valley, new york, atlanta, and also education has no longer -- it's no longer the route it was to upward mobility. people are stuck. all those studies. so, we -- there's much less fluidity. the coastal elites, a misnomer because they're not all coastal and also not elites in the sense they're not all wealthy. that term refers to a professors and journalists and activists, and coastal elites are not all white. they're often -- i think it's better to describe the group as the multicultural -- well, everyone in this room. people like me, we are -- whether you're a republican or democrat, you are -- view yourself as tolerant and you know lots of minors and you believe in religious freedom and

traveled a lot and seen people from all over the world, you probably think of yourself as not tribal because you believe in individual rights and human rights rights and cosmopolitanism. while this group tends to be very, very tribal, and going back to the ethnic difference, there is so little enter marriage between -- intermarriage between this multicultural, white but my -- my husband is jewish -- that there's almost -- it's like the egg nick divide -- ethnic divide between the two white tribes. it's starker than other ethnic groups. >> we should go to audience questions in a few minutes. if you have a question for either of us about any topics, line up at the microphones and we'll answer as best we can. i wanted to throw a couple of provocative ideas out there. the first is from a friend of mine who you know well, the

executive editor of national review. he is the son of two bangladeshan immigrants and abuse of the experiences of his family is the deeply patriotic person and sees america as this great melting pot. he wrote a column that got a fair amount of attention but not as much as it deserved to. i was something like the lining of white supremacists for open borders and his point was if you want to have an ethnically as identified and segregatedded society you should support eye level offered immigration because that tends to lend itself to ethnic clustering, and so if you're a white supremacist, what you should want is a large immigrant population because it reduces the marriage -- the intermarriage rate between differentth is in advertise. his argument was that what you want in the united states is a

sort of happy medium immigration rate and have enough folks who come in contribute to the economy and contribute culturally but not so many that i leads to this ethnic clustering and that's something that is relevant to our current immigration conversation, and the second point that i'll just throw out there and i'd love to get your response, when a lot of folks who were very upset about the election of trump, two separate strands of thought neither of which coexisting. one is this is not what america stands for, the donald trump is a xenophobe or this or that and whether you agree with the exact criticism, point they were trying to make is america is the shining city on the hill and should hold itself to a higher standard. that's the liberal critique of the trump election, another critique i heard from what i might call the left as opposed

to the liberal side of american politics, is that this is precisely what the united states of america is. that donald trump is worse than anybody says that he is, he is just as bad as his harshest critics say and is in that terribleness, the embodiment of what america really is and i think that second argument is not just misguided. i think that it's actually may lead to the types of ethnic tensions you talk about in your book, because if we don't have some common idea of an american nation, if we can't at least appeal to the same shared value, if america is -- instead of a shining city upon the hill, just a terrible country that elected terrible people, then what common idea, what common sense of purpose can we appeal to when we are arguing for political change, whether you like donald trump or don't like him.

don't know the answer to that and i won glory you think what i'm call thing left side of the political debate is missing something but the way that human tribes conceive of themselves when they make that argument. >> so, first of all, it's interesting, i -- just the e-mails i'm getting. even responses to books tend to be in the grip of political tribalism. you see from the book i am just diagnosing the problem and i don't pull any punches from either side. so, i'm answering this -- i really think that how we got here -- i don't think there's any side that is blameless. think that both political sides have been complacent and playing with fire. i do think that it's very

interesting. again, going back to my point that a lot of elites don't really understand what -- supposedly the people they're trying to help, the poor people, lower income people, want and think. so on college campuses, it's something that we feel is very important to expose the american dream as a sham. this goes to your -- to show -- i understand where this comes from and i'm completely sympathetic and part of this -- to show that we have all saud these things but so many never had access or part of it, even today people don't have the chance to climb upper mobility is dead, it's a lie. all that is actually true and that's -- i shouldn't say true but there's truth in those statements. but it is -- for a lot of working class, struggling americans, not just working class whites. of all stripe. the love the american dream. they don't hate wealth. they don't hate capitalism.

so, people that -- they'rive league kid. i think what has happened over and over in contrivers venezuela to iraq, i've seen when you have a small minority that is viewed as the smug minority, like the sunnis, 15% control thing leverrer's power and you suddenly have democracy you have this populist leader that says those aren't real americans in control of everything. let's take back our country. let's take back our country for the real americans. and that is the parallel. i if you look donald trumped, coded, make america great again and take back our country

there's a bat, who are the real americans? and the fault is on both sides. because from the point of view of -- there is a lot of racism that's coded in there. the idea is why are these coastal elites not real americans? because they love minorities and immigrants and africa's poor. so it's not like they're real americans. let's take back the heartland. then the people on the coasts are equally to blame. they onsay -- i agree with you, j. d., we can't be at this point where the people who voted on the other cider not just people we disagree with, but they're actually -- we view them as immoral enemies, like as not americans. if we start to view people on the other side of the political divide as not real americans, then we really are going to fracture into two or more if religion stop there and maybe start taking questions. >> i'll moderate the questions here and start with you on the

left. >> good evening, i'm jeff and i have a couple of questions. j. d. i'mless done reading you book, iation mamau the a tiring woman? and dish intersectionallity have a point, like a solution? >> do i -- >> so first i religion say, you, sir are were a fantastic example of advice/admission i was supposed to give chews to ask a question and not gave speech. when you're standing at the microphone, please follow his example. to answer your question, i think that in a lot of ways mamau was a tiger mom in the sense she demanded a certain amount, assumed i was probably stronger and not weaker. one of the great hallmarks of battle of the tiger mother, they

assume that children are a little stronger and that these weak things that need to be coddled. and mamau was colorful and very demanding, but she loved me and she looked out for me. think those are certainly about e when i read tiger mom, i saw parts of my grandmother's story in that book. so, the question on intersectionallity, is it a way forward. >> i teach at yale law school and intersectionallity is a term i write about and explain. it's one of the most important conceptses in academia, coming from the left, and i actually think it's a brilliant and important point. i know the person who coined the term. and it is simply referring to the fact that people can be outsiders or minorities or oppressed in different ways. you could be a woman, a hispanic woman, a very different experience than a caucasian

woman, a gay asian man may have a very different experience than a straight asian female, and so in its conception i actually lauded -- what has happened -- i try to explain this -- is that it's been used and exploited and spun out interest the public sphere like everything else on social media and cable news to mean something it really never was intended. now it just means like exponential identity politics. so it's too big a question but i will say i think the core insight is invaluable but this is the problem with tribalism. things that start off as just innocent things become instant symbols, tribal symbols. all lives matter, you know, what could be wrong with that and that now stands for something. so it's almost impossible to have a discussion because it's almost like you signal which

tribe glory by how you respond to something. >> a question for amy. in your book you wrote about countries have they gone through civil wars wars and you mentiond about rising insecurity among groups who had nonfelt before insecure. the anger, the jeer graphic cleaver vandals we're going through. are you worried we could -- cleavages are you worried we could be moving to another civil war, not five or ten years. >> i am an optimist. i'm a chronic optimist. part of this is because i think both side have been behaving really foolishly and irresponsibly. so i can -- you -- despite how horrible things feet issue think you view this as wakeup call. here's my more bigger answer. a big concept in my book is that alone among the major a powers, america is what i call supergroup, and a super group, a

country, with two characteristics. one is we have a very -- has to have a very strong overarching national identity. america. and the second characteristic of a super group is it has to allow individuals, subgroup identities to flourish, i this acountry you can be irish-american, libyan-american, japanese-american and intensely paste trottic at the same time. and believe it or not, this is extremely rare. so you take china. china has one, the super strong overarching identity. hon chinese and all the individual group identities are squashed. even france is not a super group as i explained. it's got this very strong french overarching identity but because of their policy of secular -- the brick kin any ban, can't wear head scarfs and presidents

said you have to eat, talk, and behavior like a french person. so they're not a super group either. so i believe that we have something special. i really do. i think we have something that is baked into our system. that is baked into our constitution. we have an ethnically and religiously neutral constitution. it doesn't mean we live up to the constitutional ideals. not talking about that. of course we have not. but our identity is actually -- we have it. we have the formula and right now ill see those two prongs, both coming under threat. j. d. referred to -- from the attack on the overarching identity. i happen to agree with j. d. i get in trouble for saying this because i teach on a college campus, i think there's a huge difference between saying, we have these great ideals but in the united states we have repeatedly failed to live up to them. we have shamefully betrayed our

own ideals and we must do better. that is what i believe. i think there's a huge difference between saying that and that this is a country built on hypocrisy, we have no real values and a-land of oppression and it's a fine line we have committed genocide but it's that identity that i think -- bass as i say, if really america is nothing but a land of genocide, and blight -- supremacists ump it's not worth fighting for. we have it in our dna and he hopefully 2018, 2020 -- i see positive signs among the new politicians, but -- >> one way to read both e both of your books is a critique of the elites' understand offering american politics. one particular elite, political

scientists, who are paid professionally, some 10,000 of. the, to understand the phenomena you're describing. i think it's also an implicit critique of those professionals, and the question is, if they got it so wrong -- you articulate on the trump election, the political scientists were just as bad as the average cocktail party, how did that happen? a cog native discipline. the legal field and political science, yale's political science department was not much better. so one of he great political science departments and the average cocktail party understanding what was going on. how did it happen that those professionals, paid to understand what you have described, seem to get it so wrong? maybe you disagree with the premise. >> i think it's because of tribalism. so, a lot of these political science and economic models are based on the people will act in

rationally. to promote their rational self-interests. bill the way, a lot of great political scientists are stating to question this, cognitive dissidence, and people don't really necessarily vote for their self-interests or policy but vote much more out of loyal to their affinity group or tribe. this partly explains donald trump. every day something more horrible happens. a new scandal, a porn star, and every day all of us think, this is it. now this is it. and crazy things come out of his mouth and what happens is his -- while we say, that sounds to racist or sexist, he has actually done a better job presenting himself as a member of a cultural tribe that many members of america relate to. when they see him get thing trouble for saying this or that,

they relate because they're always get thing trouble. people calling him out for saying this and they like it he pick us himself up and they're champion for that. and especially for i think lower -- i have some stat out but for poorer people, more from communities like where j. d. is from, their experience is such distrust of the establish: it's like they eve seen for generation whose care as i democrat or republican comes, they're all elites and come in and go out and nothing ever changes for us. so if the policies -- you heather seen then translating into benefit for you, stick with your tribe, vote for the person in your tribe. that's what political scientist missed, their models are built on choice and people maximizing well fair and tribalism is much more -- >> host: to say something in slight defense of political science profession, i think that it's actually as a profession

has produced a lot of interesting stuff about what happened in the 2016 election, it's a very useful discipline if your goal is to under the veryout data sets and how they explain the population. not especially useful for predictive. i don't think the goal of political science is to predict how elections will unfold so obvious my in that way they failed. wouldn't say so much a failure as just a mischaracterization of their underlying person. why if a elites missed the tea leaves and the 2016 election? well, a lot of what amy said, i would agree with, but at a fundamental level, i think that it's hard for people to appreciate just how abysmal the alternatives that people feel that they actually have. i if you're a guy who grew up in my hometown, who has seen

globalization -- the best estimate suggests since the early '90s the united states has lost seven million manufacturing jobs the work class whites adjusted mortality rate has been falling. opioid epidemic which is terrible and affected a lot of commune it's affected certain communities more than others and to there is a sense of folks back moment hat whatever is different is at least worth trying and the folk whose have been in power for a long time have really, really screwed up, and i think if you're living in washington, dc, where the median income has exploded in the past 25 years, where the opioid epidemic is something you read about in the papers, not something your neighbors experience every single day, it's hard to imagine while some people are so pessimistic. but i say just to close that out, the academic political

science literature has produce aid lot of really interesting thinking about why donald trump was ultimately elected. if you read the pages of vox, for example, you would be led to think that trump's voters were primarily racist or stupid or maybe some combination of the two, and there are lot of academic political scientists who complicated that anywhere take in interesting -- narrative in interesting ways. i think all of us and n our various ways are missing what is going on in the country because we're not spending -- to amies point about gee -- we not spending time with each other. and i think folks from back home could be -- could certainly have a better sense of what is going on among certain communities that don't look or act or think like them. so it's not a one-directional problem but it's a problem.

>> hi. i'm -- my question is pertaining to instant communication and social media and maybe the exacerbation, rapid increase in kind of identifying tribes and giving them an ability to communicate and empower each other. in a way we have never seen before. talking about it for years. remember in high school reading the article about the elimination of bowling leagues and the problems that happened in neighborhoods since then. as an example. but i remember in o'08 i started with the obama social media craze and changed -- i remember it hitting home in 2012. i'm a republican in a financially full of democrats and i remember i posted something but president obama at the time when he did. remember my mom calling and saying, oh, if you were not my

son, i would totally defriend your ass and she said that to me. and i thought, wow, will anyone really could. you really can just totally simply get someone out of your life and unfriend then and never hear them. so what in your experience -- have you send a rapid increase or kind of an increase in speed in this kind of transformation since social media became so prevalent and what has been you're experience. >> so i'll briefly answer then then amy. anything -- neil ferguson has a become cooled the square in the tower or tower in square talks but the way the modern social network effect shuts us off from other views and i think the effect that you just mentioned, i see something i don't like, therefore i unfriend that person, consequently i close

misoff from views expressed by that person. that's a significant problem and that's a way that our social media reinforces tribalism but the problem i worry about more is that all of news this room i'm assuming are educated consumers of information and i'm guessing none of us has good understanding why facebook and twister and other social media puts the information above us that it does. in other words while i worry about somebody somebody's parents unfriending people who hold views they don't like, i worry more but the fact that we don't understand the basic institutional infrastructure that puts information in front of us. he don't understand how the the algorisms put stuff in my father, we living in uncharted territory. most of us don't have a good appreciation why we consume the

information we do an that bunch of people in silicon valley programmed to put it in front of us, and we're just now dealing with the implications of that. >> i think we'll just take -- i think we'll just keep taking -- i agree with that. >> i have one, like, kind of shorter question and then one more that is in depth. the first one is there is any way to in a sense reverse this white nationalism or racism or do we just have to wait for certain people to die? and the second question is this book is something you began writing years ago so how did the rise of trump affect your content and what did it died have to your -- >> his book? >> yours. >> minimum crime out before the election. >> okay.

well, for lack of time, i think part of the problem is the reason i wrote the book is because people are so mad and so upset and so hurt that it's hard to think clearly. so i don't think that it is accurate to call 60 million people who voted on the other side white nationalists and as j. d. said, they've actually broken there is down and there are polls. ... >> this is a land of -- people are proud that it's a land of immigrants. so when you hear people, you know, hurling, calling the other side terrible names, it's not helping anybody. but i think there are many, many, many americans, possibly a great majority, who are really terrified about these huge

immigration changes and the demographic changes that we're seeing. now, among elites and liberals you can't express that anxiety. you have to be so excited about the browning of america, you know? because that would suggest you're a racist. so, but there are incredible, huge demographic change is dislocating. it's human nature. so i am the biggest fan of immigration possible. i'm the daughter of immigrants, i've written two books about how immigration is this country's life blood. at yale law school i'm involved in all of these rule of law things, but i still think americans have to be able to say i'm worried about immigration and what our country is going to look like and who's going to be in and how to we make the rules and what are the limits without instantly being labeled, oh, xenophobia, racism, islamophobe. because what happens is that just pushes the conversation underground. and that's where extremism festers, and that's where you

really do see white supremacy, ugly, ugly stuff. and that's one of the reasons that i wasn't surprised about the election. i saw what was going underground right at yale law school. ing because during the election it was sort of, i think there was one acknowledged trump supporter in the entire yale law school student body. finish i knew for a fact that there were at least maybe 20, but more importantly, there were people who were against trump deeply but who had parents, uncles, cousins, people from all parts of america. so when you just label all those people -- so i could see that there was a lot, so i'm, you know, so i think we -- i do think language is very important. i think we need to be able to address terrorism, right? i teach in a law school. very -- if you ever say i'm worried about terrorism coming from the middle east, oh, my god. i would never say that. you know? because that, you know, that's

islamophobia, that is suggesting that how about white terrorism, how about las vegas? but the point is we need to allow people to express these anxieties, because they're thinking it. they're thinking it anyway. so that's why i discuss this term ethno-nationalism in the book. >> the only additional comment is the white nationalism that really, really worries me is the white nationalism that's expressed by a 22-year-old who came from a relatively privileged background who learned it on the internet and has become a marcher in a rally in charlottesville or whatever the case may be. and that you can't just wait to die off because it's clearly gotten some foothold among some subset of young people. >> right. >> and, you know, not to sound like a sort of a nationalist or a cheesy patriot here, but my thinking is that the antidote to that is some idea is recapturing

some notion of the american project that a lot of people can share in. and to me, how you beat back the guys who are marching down charlottesville, 23-year-old idiots with nazi flags whose grandfathers defeated the nazis 40 or 50 years ago is to remind them that we kicked those people asses and to remind them there's something meaningful about this american idea. which, by the way, is hard to do if all we're hearing from the other side is the american idea is fundamentally corrupt. >> so i have a question for both of you, if that's okay. professor chua, i remember reading battle hymn of tiger mother when i was in 11th grade and thinking, oh, my god, i need to study for the s.a.t.s more -- [laughter] but i remember also that with my parents and teachers were incredibly, like, virulently anti all of your parenting

passages even though none of them had written the book. [laughter] and since then you've done other books as well, your books about mormons and jews and stuff. i read that book, and it was not what everyone was saying it was either. my question for you is has being attacked like this help you understand the strains of liberalism on the left and now on the right as well? and also how did you predict the trump victory? [laughter] and then, j.d., my question for you is -- [laughter] sorry. my question for you is i read your book, and it seems more like you, like, started it as this autobiography and accidentally predicted this huge cultural watershed moment. did you kind of expect you'd become the voice of the white working class, or were you just writing about yourself at first? [laughter] >> i didn't expect and i still don't quite think i've become the voice of the white working class. [laughter] no, really i wanted to write a book about myself but also about

some of the broader problems that i saw in the community. so i didn't mean to sort of scale out a little bit and take it slightly deeper and broader, but i didn't intend for what happened to happen. i mean, how could anybody have intended for that to happen? >> very quickly, yeah. that was 2011, battle hymn of the tiger mother controversy completely changed me, my family. yes, it was interesting to see tribalism, and i learned a lot of things. parenting is tribal. like if people have different sides. so just quickly since i know we're out of time here, i think the, how i could see that the trump thing wasn't as clear is because there were so many people talking to me -- maybe this is, i like to talk to students, you know, just like don't tell anybody, you know? but this is -- not that they wanted to, but just like worried about this or that.

and also almost all of, i mean, hillary clinton is from yale law school are. we love her. we really did have a day of mourning after. i mean, it was all the classes were canceled, people were sobbing. [laughter] oh, i'm not kidding p. we were -- everybody was crying. students came to my house, they practically slept over. [laughter] but i, well, frankly, a lot of people working in the brooklyn office, wonderful people, probably some are here tonight are actually from the same demographic. i mean, i think they later, i mean, it was not a really well -- it was kind of a coastal elite, relatively privileged. and it's hard to get good information, i think, you know? america's a really big place. >> so we just have time for two more questions. sorry to cut things short. but i have, that made me think of a funny story. a guy who was like 65 from back home who did not support donald

trump, but when the election results came in, he told me the story about his daughter who has a 3-year-old at home and said, daddy, what are you supposed -- what am i supposed to tell my daughter? he said, well, she's 3 years old, so tell her to chew with her mouth shut. [laughter] sir, your question and then you last. >> thanks. hello. you briefly talked about the need for a sort of overarching american identity, to get back to it. and i wonderedded does that time to another side of your thoughts on tribalism? is there are a strength to tribalism? can it achieve things and perhaps we didn't hear that tonight? >> i didn't hear the first part of the question, but i'll just say, again, i had some nice questions earlier that j.d. started. i get tribalism. i am a very tribal person. but i think that everybody -- that's why some of the studies in the book are so interesting. one that i love shows that

people will interpret facts and numbers to support their group's views. so you can show the same statistics and facts about, say, gun control. same picture, same everything to a group of people, and half of them will conclude from those same numbers that that's why we need more guns, and the other half will conclude that's why we need fewer. and that's something we need to think about if we want to actually do something. and that study, fascinatingly, the smarter you are -- they tested for this -- the better you are at numbers, the better you are at manipulating the numbers to fit your tribe's world view. so, yeah. and, you know, again, i think i -- family is tribal. i'm a very tribal person. so i think, i like to think of america as a tribe of tribes, right? you can think of -- that's going to the supergroup idea, going back to this idea that we should be proud of this big tribe. our identity, what makes us special is that we allow

individual, smaller tribes to flourish. >> thank you. and last question, sir. >> just one quick question. [laughter] all right, i have a question for amy. so i was confused about what you said about the vietnam war. so the vietnamese were allied with china and the soviet unien on -- union, and the original impetus was to stop communism, so i don't understand how you said the war was caused because of not being able to tell the difference between the chinese and the vietnamese. >> so, yes. the north vietnamese were communists allied with china, and south vietnamese that we were supporting were the capitalist part of it. what i was saying is that there are two pieces to this. a lot of our decisions during those years were assuming that china -- that vietnam was just a pawn of communist china's.

that is, just a puppet. and if you look through some of the later discussions by senator mcnamara, he says this is one of the biggest mistakes. not seeing how important vietnamese sovereignty was, that they would never -- that's the one country they would never be a pawn for. so even if they were temporarily allied. the point is that it was really more about nationalism, and then this ethno-nationalism than the ideology of communism. the second point is simply that all the, most of the wealthy people in vietnam belonged, were not actually vietnamese. they were not vietnamese. they were this chinese group. so how do you expect people to get excited about fighting for a system that's supposed to benefit -- one more fact you might be interested in. those of you who are old enough to remember, the boat people, this is in 1978, a lot of vietnamese came over. they were known as the boat people.

80% of the boat people in 1978 were actually ethnic chinese. not vietnamese. so i'll talk to students now and i'll say -- they'll say i'm vietnamese, and i'll say, well, are you ethnic chinese? they'll say, no, no, no, we're vietnamese. and i'll say go ask your parents. they'll come back and they'll say, oh, my god, turns out my grandparents -- there was ethnic cleansing after the vietnam war, so anybody who admitted they were actually chinese would be killed or sent to labor camps. so anyway, i explain the whole thing more. i'm sorry, that's just a partial answer. >> all all right, guys. join me in thank amy chua. >> thank you for coming. thank you, j.d. [applause] >> and thank you all for coming. [applause] >> thank you all for coming tonight. if you're staying for the signing, please stay seated. for those who are not staying for the signing, you can exit

through the main sanctuary lobby and this corner lobby to my right. if you are not staying for the signing, you can exit through the corner lobby and the main lobby to my right. [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] >> here's a look at some of the books that are being published this week. in fascism, former u.s. secretary of state madeleine

albright warns against the rise in fascist tactics by world leaders. best selling author barbara ehrenreich explores the fear of death in natural causes. in the lives of a constitution, joseph provides a history of the u.s. constitution. and cnn's sally kohn explores the causes of hate in america in the opposite of hate. also being published this week with, the gift of our wounds. former white principle cyst arno and religious -- supremacists report on their efforts to unite students and communities. stanford university history professor pria details how the trade of guns aided in the industrial revolution in empire of guns. in can democracy survive global capitalism, robert kuttner argues that global capitalism is shrinking the job market. and executive editor of foreign affairs daniel -- [inaudible] chronicles u.s. general george

marshall's efforts to end the 1945 chinese civil war in the china mission. look for these titles in bookstores this coming week and watch for many of the authors in the near future on booktv on c-span2. [inaudible conversations] >> good evening, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to barnes & noble upper west side. steven pinker is a harvard college professor of psychology at harvard university. a two-time pulitzer prize finalist and the winner of many awards for his research, teaching and books, he has been named one of "time"'s 100 most influential people in the world today. and foreign policy's 100 global thinkers. he brings us tonight his new book,